Through a twist of fate that the author of "Labyrinths" himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967-1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, "This Craft of Verse" captures the cadences, candour, wit and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the 20th century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony of to the life of literature. Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms (especially the novel), literary history and translation theory to philosophical aspects of literature in particular and communication in general. Probably the best-read citizen of the globe in his day, he draws on a wealth of examples from literature in modern and mediaeval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese, speaking with characteristic eloquence on Plato, the Norse "kenningar", Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce and Frost, as well as on translations of Homer, the Bible, and the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam. Whether discussing metaphor, epic poetry, the origins of verse, poetic meaning, or his own "poetic creed", Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and in the making of a unique literary sensibility, this is a sustained encounter with one of the writers by whom the 20th century will be long remembered.

Jorge Luis Borges's famous 1941 meditation on language, alphabets, and the library that contains all knowledge is an allegory of our Universe, and in this edition is complemented and enhanced by the etching of the French artist, Érik Desmazières.

“Borges’s composed, carefully wrought, gnarled style is at once the means of his art and its object—his way of ordering and giving meaning to the bizarre and terrifying world he creates: it is a brilliant, burnished instrument, and it is quite adequate to the extreme demands his baroque imagination makes of it . . . . Absolutely and most vividly original.”—Saturday Review

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal’s abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges’s Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges’s genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

Contents
Fictions
Tlon, uqbar, orbis, tertius
The garden of forking paths
The lottery in Babylon
Pirre menard, author of the Quixote
The circular ruins
The library of babel
Funes the memorious
The shape of the sword
Theme of the traitor and the hero
Death and the compass
The secret miracle
Three versions of Judas
The sect of the phoenix
The immortal
The theologians
Story of the warrior and the captive
Emma zunz
The house of asterion
Deutsches requiem
Averroes' search
The zahir
The waiting
The God's script
Essays
The argentine writer and tradition
The wall and the books
The fearful sphere of Pascal
Partial magic in the Quixote
Valery as symbol
Kafka and his precursors
Avatars of the tortoise
The mirror of enigmas
A note on Bernard Shaw
A new refutation of time
Parables
Inferno, I, 32
Paradise, XXXI, 108
Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote
The witness
A problem
Borges and I
Everything and nothing

`Here is a handsome edition of one of Borges' ficciones, in a translation first published in Labyrinths in 1962. It's an important story in the Borges' canon, incorporating most of the author's philosophical and esthetic preoccupations in a typically brief compass. With great solemnity and a convincing array of scholarly detail (including annotated references to imaginary books and articles), Borges contocts a fable of an alternate world and its infiltration of our own. The reality of Tlon is idealist: material objects have no existence; language has no nouns; its principal discipline is psychology, since its inhabitants see the universe as nothing but a series of mental processes. A series of 24 illustrations accompanies the text. Their disturbing resemblances to our reality make them appropriate reflections of Borges's imaginative constructs.' -- The Kingston Whig-Standard

本书收录了博尔赫斯在哈佛大学任职期间与理查德·伯金所作的著名访谈，他曾说，“理查德·伯金让我重新认识自己。”他给出了针对自己和他人的文学作品的真知灼见，并谈到了现在常常为人忽略的诸多政治主张。而辞世前几日，他和好友莱库比曾进行过一次私密的访谈，涉及他的生活、爱以及对自己作品和国家的种种思考，也是真正意义上“最后的访谈”。这几次贯穿博尔赫斯写作生涯的访谈，为读者了解这位20世纪最著名的文化巨擘打开窗口。

“Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me.”
Days before his death, Borges gave an intimate interview to his friend, the Argentine journalist Gloria Lopez Lecube. That interview is translated for the first time here, giving English-language readers a new insight into his life, loves, and thoughts about his work and country at the end of his life.

Accompanying that interview are a selection of the fascinating interviews he gave throughout his career. Highlights include his celebrated conversations with Richard Burgin during Borges's time as a lecturer at Harvard University, in which he gives rich new insights into his own works and the literature of others, as well as discussing his now oft-overlooked political views. The pieces combine to give a new and revealing window on one of the most celebrated cultural figures of the past century.

In May 2005 Penguin will publish 70 unique titles to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. The titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth of quality of the Penguin list and will hark back to Penguin founder Allen Lane's vision of good books for all'. Jorge Luis Borges wrote playful and deeply imaginative short stories that explored philosophy, paradox and the nature of existence. Penguin Modern Classics publish all of his most famous works, including Labyrinths, The Aleph and Fictions. This collection includes seven classic Borges tales which intrigue, inspire and mesmerize through their singular genius.

Though universally acclaimed for his dazzling works of fictions, Jorge Luis Borges always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems--the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime's work--from Borges' first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los Conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions by a remarkable cast of translators, including Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, and John Updike.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"Selected Poems" brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including many never previously translated. The brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched with luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators, among them W.S. Merwin, John Updike, Robert Fitzgerald, Mark Strand and Alastair Reid.

The third and final jewel in the crown of Viking's acclaimed three-volume centenary edition of Borges's collected works in English
Though best known in the United States for his short fictions and poems Jorge Luis Borges is just as revered in Latin America as an immensely prolific writer of nonfiction prose. Now, following on the success of the critically acclaimed Fictions, Viking's Selected Non-Fictions brings more than 150 of Borges's most brilliant writings together for the first time in one volume--all in superb new translations. More than a hundred of the pieces have never previously been translated into English.
Even Borges aficionados are sure to be amazed to discover the extent of the master's interests. Like the Aleph in his famous story--the magical point in a certain basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view everything in the world--Borges's unlimited curiosity and almost superhuman erudition become, in his nonfiction, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe. He was equally at home with Schopenhauer and Ellery Queen, King Kong and the Kabbalists, James Joyce or Alfred Hitchcock, Flaubert, the Buddha, and the Dionne Quints!
The first comprehensive selection of this work in any language, the Selected Non-Fictions presents Borges at once as a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe.

Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges's most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight, he takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father’s “killer,” and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house.  This volume also contains the hauntingly brief vignettes about literary imagination and personal identity collected in
, which Borges wrote as failing eyesight and public fame began to undermine his sense of self.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. For to enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lie Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. Now for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. Together these incomparable works comprise the perfect one-volume compendium all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master's work for those who have yet to discover this singular genius.

This unique volume presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers: his extraordinary non--fiction prose. Borges' unlimited curiosity and almost superhuman erudition become, in his essays, reviews, lectures, and political and cultural notes, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe: Dante and Ellery Queen; Shakespeare and the Kabbalah; the history of angels and the history of the tango; the Buddha, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quints.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism
Chosen International Book of the Year by George Steiner in the Times Literary Supplement

'Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous.'
Fantastical tales of mazes, puzzles, lost labyrinths and bookish mysteries, from the unique imagination of a literary magician.